Julius Caesar

We often use the term “novel of ideas”, but a couple of centuries before the establishment of the novel as a genre, Julius Caesar provides us with a good example of a play of ideas: the play engages deeply with the politics of its Roman setting, and contains a good deal of public oratory.

Shakespeare adapts Thomas North’s 1579 translation of Plutarch’s Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans, and distills the extensive historical chronicle with a level of skill probably honed from his recent completion of the second tetralogy of English history plays. Julius Caesar is taut and punchy, and stands alongside Macbeth as one of Shakespeare’s most powerfully compressed tragedies.

There is a constant concern with the power of rhetoric, and how an individual’s actions will be perceived by the eternal judge of history: Caesar is a historical play for all time.

Julius Caesar editions:

The Arden Shakespeare
The Yale Annotated Shakespeare
The Oxford Shakespeare
The New Cambridge Shakespeare
Signet Classics Shakespeare